


Return 0;

by Autononymous



Category: 4chan - Fandom, Internet - Fandom, cyberpunk - Fandom, j-pop, otaku - Fandom, videogames - Fandom
Genre: 4chan, Alternative Universe Cyberpunk, American - Freeform, Cat/Human Hybrids, Cyberpunk, Furries, Gangsters, Internet, Japanese, Other, Punk, Weeaboo, fandoms - Freeform, geek, nerd, noir, nyan - Freeform, otaku
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-09 22:02:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20517137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Autononymous/pseuds/Autononymous
Summary: A world saturated in electronics, showered in sparks, smothered in loose wires with bad soldering. The distant "nyan" of a cat girl dies underneath the steady thrum of J-pop bangers. Welcome to The Basement, an underground semen shed where Japan and America sent its collective degenerates post-occupation of the United States. Dean Harrowitz, diabetic and unhappy with life, embarks into its heart of darkness with the black bushido, Marcel Encell, to recover no less than 327 copies of the world's most degenerate doujinshi, or get yiffed trying.Return 0; is a love letter to internet and chan-culture.





	1. Thread 1

“See, this self-centered, choose-for-yourself-your-own-destiny bullshit that Sartre or other dead frogs jerked off over really isn’t all that profound,” said the man that I had never met, with eyes like shotguns and razor wire. Speaking of shotguns, have you ever seen a Winchester up close? I imagine they’re exquisite weapons when they’re well taken care of. He striped his red, white, and blue. “Can’t you talk? You can sure open your fat mouth enough to eat the state’s cock.”

I stared down the paint instead.

He wouldn’t close his own patriotic gullet. “See, we like to emphasize the individual, we like to pretend that we are all like fish who swim in their own directions. Often convenient for us, our governments, healthcare workers and moms that we swim in the same direction, usually. The idea of humanism or existentialism is not an individual notion, because no person is an individual actor. It’s a fun idea in a vacuum, but selfish people, such as yourself, get killed off by people like me. You hinder our growth.”

“And you are?” I asked.

“Ah, so he can speak. Think of me as a kind of immune response. Mother nature's immune response. Your whole ‘I am the master of my destiny shit’ is just how a society regulates itse-”

“No, your name you dipshit. I’d like to know the name of the man who has a gun to my head,” I said.

My knees were tired, and this guy wasn’t making a lick of sense. He forced me to sit felattio-style for a whole 20 minutes, and so there I sat, listening to this windbag drone on and on about his vaguely anarchist moods and rants, which could have found a pleasant home in the diary of a 13-year-old in middle schooler — all entirely at eye-to-crotch level.

“Raphael. Do you know that name? What that name means?” He said, and his whiskey-darkened breath was enough to drag me out of my own disparaging inner-monologue.

I hummed for a bit, searching the letter ‘R’ in my brain, landing somewhere around the word ‘retarded’ and ‘recalcitrant.’

“You’re a ninja turtle?” I said. The retarded ninja turtle stuck me in the nose with the barrel of his gun.

“Raphael is the name of a great Italian artist, someone who brought such profound meaning and beauty into the world that he’s become a beacon of light for oppressed people like me, and- hey, what the fuck are you doing?”

I had wrapped my lips around the barrel of the gun, hoping to speed things along, lest he start with a backstory.

“I sensed a monologue coming on, so I wanted to let you know that I’m ready to get this party started whenever you’re ready. You’re ready, right?” I said, a mouth full of iron.

This whole thing was getting to be annoying as hell. First, I cried when he beat me over the head with a brick and put a blindfold over my eyes. Anyone would cry when being assaulted on their way home from work.

My shame burned like a molten pizza roll in my mouth. I wanted to die. Sure, I had a blissful, single-room apartment to come home to, and many animated women to write fictional stories about. And there was pizza for dinner, and that cute delivery girl who always works nights to gawk at from my blindfolded windows. Oh, and there were people on the internet who had very disconcerting opinions about one of my favorite in-game weapons from Daggers Edge who needed their violent homosexuality reaffirmed. But when he started playing soft classical - Debussy I think - whispering all this stuff about reclaiming the individual from a collectivist society, I did kind of agree with his plan to ‘splatter my gutless body all over the fucking walls,’ and that was purley out of a need to escape his presence. His performance was so corny. It had no tact, no class, no character. I could hardly believe this was the patron saint of the rebellion, and his plan was to accost me, of all people, on my way home from work.

‘Raphael’ was definitely not ready to light this candle, because he stabbed me in the nose with the barrel again, and told me shut the fuck up and stop trying to suck start his shotgun.

I started to bleed. God, I hated blood. The sight of my body’s own juice made my stomach heave forward like it was trying to crawl out of my mouth. Instead, I heaved forward. In my conniption fit, I knocked the gun out of Raphael’s hands. It went skittering into the darkness, well out of the reach of the warehouse’s lights. Were I not well bound at my hands and knees, I’m sure I could have seized this opportunity to use my 70+ pound advantage to crush Raphael like the wiry little tweaker he was. All I could do was watch that horrible tear of blood heave down my upper lip with all the urgency of a xan’d turtle, and splatter on the concrete beneath me. The sight churned my guts. I fought the urge to cry genuine tears of pain while Raphael went looking for his candy-cane striped shotgun.

Two things were happening at this moment that would rock the American underground to its festering core. My would-be attacker was looking for his shotgun in the dark while I watched blood drain out of my face, and somewhere in some warehouse across town, someone lost a shipment of 327 copies of uncensored doujinshi - an illicit import straight from the motherland itself - and was now about to pay for it with the collective biological weight of their skull’s contents, spewed across the warehouse’s floors.

In that moment, all of our fates were intertwined. I had some connection to this strange, perverted man: the man who would then go hunting for that doujinshi, the man who I would accompany on our eroge odyssey. We were men of the rising sun, or we aspired to be, beating our collective dicks to the same two-dimensional women. Our fates were bound at the dick by the inter-dimensional Chinese-finger-trap of trap-loving tightness. To free our meat swords -- we would have to get closer and touch tips, before we could ever get farther apart.


	2. >Thread 2: No Homo Bro

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A world saturated in electronics, showered in sparks, smothered in loose wires with bad soldering. The distant "nyan" of a cat girl dies underneath the steady thrum of J-pop bangers. Welcome to The Basement, an underground semen shed where Japan and America sent its collective degenerates post-occupation of the United States. Dean Harrowitz, diabetic and unhappy with life, embarks into its heart of darkness with the black bushido, Marcel Encell, to recover no less than 327 copies of the world's most degenerate doujinshi, or get yiffed trying.
> 
> Return 0; is a love letter to internet and chan-culture.

>DEAN HARROWITZ

Let’s start at the base. Or the bottom, in my case. It was a climb for both of us doujinshi-loving freaks who had never met once before in our lives, and maybe only skirted by each other in the awful, smelly hallways of those shops that you lie to people about going to, like two ships both mutually carrying drugs passing by each other in the night. I’d never met him before, didn’t even know his face, because in places like The Sticky Page, a popular doujinshi den, you don’t usually make eye-contact.

Where they got these little beauties though, now that’s a subject for a hard-hitting reporter to take on.

Vaginas. We’re talking full on (censored) vaginas. You could see everything. Almost. From nipples to assholes to vaginas to dicks, dick nipples, shitting dick nipples, girls with dicks, men with vaginas, all of with those awful black bars over every crotch and crotch fluid in mainstream pornography. That’s what The Sticky Page nobly carried despite the strict ban on “genitalia in states of arousal.” The penalty was a stint in prison and a good couple beatings, so making friends here was not a very popular thing to do.

We were just two honest, hardworking perverts of America trying to find bipedal girls with dog dicks so they could go home and unwind after a long day of whatever menial task they do in order to finance their dog-dick habits (in my case, I was a mediocre electronics engineer in Kiba). God I’m way off base, and a couple bucks short.

The register rang me up at 4,527 yen for one copy of “行こう、赤いロケットを照らす!” (Go, Go, Shining Red Rocket!) I opened up my wallet and withdrew four 1,000 yen note bills, but that’s about all I had. The man behind the counter, his face obscured with a surgical mask, eyes cold and uncaring, told me I still owed him 527 yen in very broken English. I laughed, thumbing at the plastic seal of my chosen vice.

“You think you could let it slide this time? I mean, I’m here a lot. I think I’ve seen you more than the other girl who works here,” I said, searching his black trench coat adorned with pins and patches for a nametag. I found one in English scrawl. “Yomaru? Yomaru is your name?” I asked with a slight attempt at humility. Though I could not see his mouth, I could tell that this man did not like me very much. He held out his hands, and I deposited my dog-dick-girl doujinshi into his firm grasp, leaving with enough money for pizza several times over, but deprived of a sustenance that no Italian could provide.

They buried the Sticky Page beneath several layers of concrete and municipal waste-treatment facilities. Everything down here was so deep into the earth that you could only feel the wind if someone turned a fan in your direction, though to assume that this place was some kind of criminal underworld would be a huge mistake. It was an underworld, but not a fire and brimstone underworld. Think more body odor and semen, smells common to basements. Which is what everyone called it. And this basement could put Old Vegas to shame.

Everywhere you looked there was madness in one form or the other, saturated in an electric glow of cheap electronics, neon-signs, and vague J-Pop hits, pounding off in the distance like tribal drums during a hunt, or like a guy who had just walked out of The Sticky Page with a missing 4,527 yen and a shrink-wrapped copy of Go, Go, Shining Red Rocket!

I parked myself on a bike rack and watched the trains roar past the station, then speed into the darkness of the earth. I watched for things I could understand, like figures who were often spray painted on these trains. I was looking for a girl with red hair and green eyes, who had on a hat that looked like the stem of a tomato. I couldn’t read Kanji, but I knew that the Tomato-Chan train was at least bound for Perry, which is near where I lived down here. I could walk to my apartment from the Perry station if I fat-girl-hoofed it. The only thing my swelling ass wasn’t looking forward to was the train ride itself. I’d have to force myself between Oni-Sans and drug dealers; the dichotomy of life down in the basement — large breasted older sisters, and people who slang dope. Sometimes they were the same person.

Since the occupation, it felt like America had suddenly gotten more crowded. Once the highways were closed down and cars dismantled or repurposed, people came back into the city. Where the Japanese and upstanding Americans went up with their skyscrapers to accommodate the greater flow of people, us degenerates, failures, rejects, NEETs, junkies, rebels, hackers, chem-fiends, stalkers, killers, looters, robbers, dealers and every hideous name you had for a person didn’t like, went down, deep into the earth, where we’ve always naturally been at home. The Americans called this level of the city “The Basement.” The Japanese called it the “Andāwārudo,” and like I said before, it’s not a bad name.

I checked the LCD display I kept in my pocket for the time and wondered when Tomato-Chan was coming to whisk me away to my one-bed-one-bath-quiet-ass-apartment.

The time read 11 p.m., though it could be wrong. When it made me two hours late to work a few days ago I began to call into question my programming ability. Maybe I’d missed my train? That meant a long, dangerous walk back home, wishing my fat ass had ridden my e-bike to the doujin den.

I started walking and moving through the sea of sweaty freaks like a boulder trying to walk its way upstream. I’m big, okay? And when you’re a thicc boy, you’re an even bigger target for the passerbys.

A group of young women in skimpy Statue of Liberty cosplay pushed through the busy crowds of people and shoved a flyer in my face.

“Are you doing your part to fight the Japanese oppression on American soil?” They asked. The only thing I was fighting at that moment was an erection and social anxeity — a deadly COCKtail.

I took the flyer from one statuette and did my usual ritual of reading half of it out loud. The Liberty-Chans’ eyes gleamed with American pride and their spittle gathered in their mouth like rabid animals as I carefully laid out each word on my tongue, tasting for myself Apple Pie, baseball games and institutionalized racism.

People were stopping and staring. And so I crumpled it up and hurled the mint-green flyer onto the nearby tracks. The girls deflated. “Traitor,” one of them hissed. She jabbed my rolls with a plastic green torch. I started walking.

Getting accused of being a weeaboo (one who abandons their own culture for a glorious caricature of Japanese society) down here would get me curb stomped. Yet there was so much Japanese everything around me that whenever I left my house I experienced an identity crisis. At least those cute Liberty-Chans were still nice to ogle, not like the naked older lady who thought she was wearing an American flag but was instead tweaking out the entire experience.

I tightened my messenger bag across my chest and started for the Northbound tunnel when a nasaled whine accosted me from behind. It was so disconnected from reality that it made me look normal. I tried to ignore it, but I knew who the voice belonged to, and it knew my name.

“Dean! Stand your ground!” It demanded. I groaned as I felt the tip of something phallic and plastic forced against my back. “Had this been a combat scenario you’d have been dead.”

I turned to face my assailant. Standing before me was a thin, wiry figure, draped in an ill-fitting trench-coat. His dark eyes stared up at me from behind a pair of rummaged sunglasses. Harley. He tipped his fedora to me and sheathed his plastic sword in a belt-loop on his black jeans. “A fine evening, my good sir,” he said, thinking he was my friend.

“Harley, I really don’t have your stuff okay?” I said, trying to move out of the way of the oncoming foot traffic. I did a slight bow as a cat girl walked by, glaring daggers at myself for associating with someone as visually obnoxious as Harley. “I just got back from The Sticky Page and they didn’t have your giantess doujin in stock.”

“Didn’t have it?” Harley cried, dropping to his knees, raising his fingerless-gloved hands to the concrete sky. “OH GODS, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME!?”

“Harley!” I grabbed that skinny retard and pulled him to his feet. “Please don’t do this in public, okay? I’m not happy either. They didn’t have my stuff in-stock at all.” Both statements were total lies. I couldn’t afford what I wanted, and I didn’t want Harley thinking we were friends. I’d dropped enough hints already.

It was presumptuous of me to help him and not assume that he would react in some socially inappropriate manner. I must have been too trusting, or too innocent, but given my previous errand, it was probably the former.

“Unhand me, fiend!” He cried with a false masculinity and octave in his voice, trying maybe to joke and play with me. Upon being thrown to his feet (with as much force as I could muster), his pale, boney fingers tightened around the sword still tucked in his belt-loop. With a snap of his wrists, he swung that plastic sabre with enough force to properly concuss a child. His arc, unbalanced and practiced only through imitating anime fight scenes, was too much force for his twiggish arms. The sword ended up rocking this black guy in the face who was just trying to pass by us.

My servile instincts kicked in almost before Harley’s sword caught the stranger. I am that much of a fucking bug. In fact, social faux pas happens in slow motion for me, it’s that traumatic. I don’t know if it was childhood bullying or my brief stint in a finishing school, but things such as Harley’s every single action seem to just be a giant source of anxiety for me.

Harley’s stupid little sword thwacked this guy in the nose, and I’d already started apologizing. I rushed past that awkward little stick and shoved him to the ground so I could gain some proximity and make my apology seem more sincere. I started with a hard bow like I was trying to suck my cock, and noticed on the way down that this guy was wearing a pair of sandals and not your standard issue glitzed sneakers. I started the upward arc of my bow, shouting, “Gommenesai, gomen, gomen, gomen! I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” all the way up, noticing that with each inch, this guy’s clothes became more purposeful, lacking the tent-a-body fit that most casual, law-abiding Americans opted for. Our accidental victim had all black pants, a crisp white button down, a leather-jacket with collars raised up almost to his ears, and a look of resentment, changing into impatience from behind his bleached white glasses.

His hair sat straight and flowed down from his skull in a dyed and almost blinding white.

“This idiot can’t control himself…” I stuttered, “I- man, Harley, you apologize to this guy, okay?”

I shoved Harley towards his victim. He landed with an uncoordinated stumble.

“Oh, my deepest apologies good sir, I meant you no harm. You know how the blade has a mind of its own yes, yes…” he said to the guy’s shoes. It was only when he looked up and saw that the good sir he attacked was actually (Harley’s own words about the event later that night, not mine) a “black knight”, did he trail off into a stream of panicked, slightly angry gasps, mumbling in his clipped octave about how he was sorry and that his mom wants him to go home or that he has somewhere he has to be. His other hand ripped deep into his pocket, on a quest for something, maybe some money, maybe an inhaler, maybe the tazer his mom bought for his thirteenth birthday.

It was the inhaler. Harley stared at the guys shoes and kept apologizing, and had I been stronger and less dependent on Harley’s mom for rides home from the train station, I would have left him to his fate.

“You know who the fuck I am?” the man seethed. “You know who the fuck I work for, little twig-ass bitch? Call me Mugen, nigga, ‘cause I could get the twist on you with a snap,” he said. I about pissed myself twice once for my sake, and then I’d pour one out for Harley, who was about to get his skull fractured by this black bushido.

What stopped me from pissing myself is the smile of approval I saw on the guy’s face, saying everything I needed to know without words at all. He’d abstain from braining Harley tonight, no matter how much that no-beard neck beard deserved it. The bushido was just going to humiliate him. It was Harley’s social genius and covert racism that prevented him from reading that smile. He stood there, mumbling stuff at the guy’s shoes, but nobody could hear him, not above the rattle of the trains or the hypnotic thrum of J-pop, or the schizophrenic din of the evening crowds making their way topside or deeper into the annals of The Basement.

“Y-yes, I’m aware, gomen, gomen,” Harley sharply wheezed. That deafening crunch of iron heaving into bone never came. The pipe-wielding man just glared down at Harley, taking an immense amount of pleasure in watching this slow meltdown happening at his feet.

With bottle-rocket intensity, Harley jolted upwards and power-walked up the nearest set of stairs, unable to command his body into even a loose jog. It was just a manual walk. All the way up the stairs. Our eyes watched this ghastly figure ascend into the next layer as if he’d just been freshly fucked by a cactus.

“Again, I’m so sorry, man. He’s just… hard to control. I don’t really know him if we’re being honest. He’s just some guy who keeps hitting me up for… some things,” I caught myself before spilling that I had just wandered out of a doujinshi-den. I tried to ease the awkward silence by extending my arm for a handshake.

“Dean. Uhhh, my name is Dean. Er…”

I met his studying gaze and fell silent.

“Nah, you good white boy. You good Gene,” He said to me. “You got respect.”

Gene? I thought I said Dean? I opened my mouth to correct him, but he started belly-laughing, and I saw the pipe slung up on his shoulder. I rolled with it. Somewhere between my failed introduction and this guy’s belly-laugh, I dug my fingers into the back of my neck and pretended I had an itch.

“You and me’s like Mugen and Jin.” He remarked. To an otaku and general piece of trash such as myself, this caught me off-guard. Here I was, groveling for my life in front of this threatening guy, and he started dropping anime shit on me like it’s nothing. In all of my social genius, I still wasn’t sure where I could take this conversation. My mind started combing through what responses I’d seen other people do in movies or games or anime, and how they postured their bodies, but I came up with almost nothing, save for an unhelpful scene in a terrible romcom where two women are talking and one puts a sassy hand on her hips, letting her purse slide into the crook of her elbows and-

“Hey I’ll catch you round here man. The name’s Marcel. You hang out in The Basement a lot? I feel like I seen you here before, Gene. We need more people like you down here. Too many punks.”

I slapped my hands on my hips. I don’t know. I just lost control of my muscles and did the first thing I could think of.

“O-Okay, I’ll see you around… Brother.”

And so I stood there, jutting my hips to the right, arms and elbows bowed out, calling this guy I’d never met who could brain me in one fell swoop Brother. It was here that the narrative for me started to get a little more hazy, as the anxiety started to blur things from my consciousness. I think I passed out, and yet when lucidity returned to me, I was in the same spot, holding the same pose. The guy disappeared into the sea of cat girls and traps and military police and furries and punks, stalkers, gearfags and… you get the picture.

The last train of the night came to the station, degassing in the cool Basement air. Its doors opened and the collective wasterels of mankind spilled out around me, strolling towards their apartments or houses or alleys or internet cafes, or wherever they slept. I had an apartment to get to, and one last train to get there with.

My full name is Dean Harrowitz, though most people call me ‘Dean’ or ‘faggot’ for short. I hadn’t paid for a train pass that night, wanting to save my hard earned yen for something at The Sticky Page, or at the very least, a pizza so I could gawk at the delivery girl.

I sat on the midnight train, shifting my weight and scanning the passengers as the rickety old car blasted through tunnels and stations. My fellow transportation teammates had gotten too lost in their own personal tech or obvious fetishes to even give a shit about anyone else. I checked my LCD, but the time was a taunting 12 a.m. that blinked with every skip of my struggling heart. Useless piece of shit. The programmer, not the LCD itself.

Most nights the rail cops don’t check tickets, yet as the 05 line northbound to Perry cut clean through the dark of the tunnels, charging forward like a bullet, leaving in its wake the tunnel junkies and biker gangs who couldn’t clock 60 miles-per-hour, I heard whispers of a rail cop moving down the line. This information came to me from a guy with purple fox ears grafted to the side of his shaved skull, so I trusted this “person” about as much as I trusted a fart. Still.

I glanced about the car and saw people rummaging through their baggy pockets for tickets. I unslung my messenger bag and followed suit, dumping it onto the seat next to me. Guess I was as prejudiced as everyone else was towards everyone else. No big surprise.

Diodes, circuit boards, breadboards, fuses, LEDs, soldering sponge, wires, and memory cards all vomited forward in a silicone pile. I was looking for two things: something that could both resemble a ticket, and the USB stick I always kept on my person. I found an old ticket and the USB just as the door to my train-car swung open. A heavily armed, lightly armored rail cop blurred down the line, his cattle prod already drawn. Typical. A pair of augmented glasses rapidly scanned tickets with a single glance. His HUD was driving him forward — towards me — like the crack of an electric whip that would soon singe the hair off my ass if I wasn’t careful.

I was poor for a lot of reasons - my job was shitty, and I was lazy, and in my defense, nobody made much money, especially if you’re an otaku. I hawked electronics at people from a bin, like some fishmonger or something topside. In Kiba, there were two main industries: otaku shit; your various furries, neckbeards, whiteknights, gearheads, hackers, punks, weeaboos, LARPers, and everything else that’d make your parents cringe; maid girls, dancers, bouncers, shrine girls, catgirls (the non-furry kind) and whatever the hell a predator was. It was a world saturated in electronics, showered in sparks, smothered in loose wires with bad soldering. To make some cash on the side to fuel my lavish lifestyle, I also built e-bike kits for punks, hackers, and whoever coughed up for my modest fees. People will shell out for a bike that could break the 15mph limiters, and mine sure did. Boy those fucking things could catch anything that wasn’t a train, and even then, they’d put up a hell of a chase. I kept my books, schematics, parts list and everything else on the flash drive that I shoved down my throat. I was trying to double encrypt it (once digitally, which is illegal as it pings on any cop’s scanner; and then again by my colon).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Autononymous is a collective of writers, programmers, and artists hell-bent on creating something that means something to someone.
> 
> Follow us on our website for updates: https://sites.google.com/view/autononymous/home?authuser=0
> 
> Contact Autononymous137@gmail.com

**Author's Note:**

> Autononymous is a collective of writers, programmers, and artists hell-bent on creating something that means something to someone.
> 
> Follow us on our website for updates: https://sites.google.com/view/autononymous/home?authuser=0
> 
> Contact Autononymous137@gmail.com


End file.
